While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’ $4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road, George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst with mortgage bank industry speculators.

Both acts were wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke was using ours.

This week, Bernanke’s Fed, for the first time in its history, loaned a selected coterie of banks one-fifth of a trillion dollars to guarantee these banks’ mortgage-backed junk bonds. The deluge of public loot was an eye-popping windfall to the very banking predators who have brought two million families to the brink of foreclosure.

Up until Wednesday, there was one single, lonely politician who stood in the way of this creepy little assignation at the bankers’ bordello: Eliot Spitzer.

Who are they kidding? Spitzer’s lynching and the bankers’ enriching are intimately tied.

How? Follow the money.

The press has swallowed Wall Street’s line that millions of US families are about to lose their homes because they bought homes they couldn’t afford or took loans too big for their wallets. Ba-LON-ey. That’s blaming the victim.

Here’s what happened. Since the Bush regime came to power, a new species of loan became the norm, the ‘sub-prime’ mortgage and its variants including loans with teeny “introductory” interest rates. From out of nowhere, a company called ‘Countrywide’ became America’s top mortgage lender, accounting for one in five home loans, a large chunk of these ‘sub-prime.’...

‘Steering,’ sub-prime loans with usurious kickers, fake inducements to over-borrow, called ‘fraudulent conveyance’ or ‘predatory lending’ under US law, were almost completely forbidden in the olden days (Clinton Administration and earlier) by federal regulators and state laws as nothing more than fancy loan-sharking.

But when the Bush regime took over, Countrywide and its banking brethren were told to party hearty – it was OK now to steer’m, fake’m, charge’m and take’m.

But there was this annoying party-pooper. The Attorney General of New York, Eliot Spitzer, who sued these guys to a fare-thee-well. Or tried to.

Yes, it's insane, and once again a good Democrat has lost his political career for awhile, if not permanently.

How on earth could Spitzer be so stupid as to forget, even for a nanosecond, that he was being watched....monitored, and no doubt bugged right down to his every fart and snore being recorded by the Bush spying program! He did exactly what Bill Clinton did....started thinking with his smaller head, stepped into deep shit, and now he's just so much political mincemeat ground up in the Bush Butcher Shop.

Of course, none of that excuses what the Bushies are doing to enrich those who are financial predators, including themselves. Greg Palast has once again taken the hidden elements out of what should be a scandal of gargantuan proportions...and I'm not talking about Eliot Spitzer's little sexual indescretion.

At lefty's link to Palast's report, I noticed there are no comments!

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"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."Honore de Balzac

"Democrats work to help people who need help. That other party, they work for people who don't need help. That's all there is to it."~Harry S. Truman

_________________"If the people allow private banks to control their currency the banks and corporations will deprive the people of all their property until their children will wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered." - Thomas Jefferson

This sort of falls in line with everything. Kinda weird. I'm trying to figure the angle out on this one. What do you think?

Quote:

Fischer defends dollar purchase

Israeli intervention in the foreign exchange market last week was not indicative of any monetary policy change, but rather was an act meant to maintain price stability in keeping with government objectives, Bank of Israel Governor Stanley Fischer said on Sunday.

Prof. Elise Brezis says an economic slowdown is inevitable

"We are going through a tough period of instability and uncertainty in the global market," Fischer said during a press conference. "Recently, the value of the shekel against the dollar, and against other foreign currencies, has started to become less stable."

"By December 2007, we were able to say that the phenomenon that was taking place was less a strengthening of the shekel, and more a weakening of the dollar," Fischer noted.

Last Thursday, the Bank of Israel intervened in the foreign exchange market for the first time since 1997, buying an undisclosed amount of foreign currency as the shekel-dollar exchange rate fell below the psychological barrier of NIS 3.40.

According to Fischer, the fact that the Bank of Israel was not involved in the foreign exchange may have worked to the shekel's advantage.

. . . . The move by the Bank of Israel came as a surprise, since over the past couple of months Governor of the Bank of Israel Stanley Fischer reiterated the bank's stance in favor of a free market for the shekel, rejecting urgent calls by exporters to intervene to ease the sharp plunge of the shekel-dollar exchange rate hurting their profits.

"What's going on now is that the dollar has moved against us. Indeed, it's moved against everybody in terms of exports," Fischer said in an interview with The Jerusalem Post to be published next week. "Against the euro we haven't strengthened so much, so the European market looks better, and there is growth in Asia. So the exporters have to start reorienting [themselves], without being so extremist as to forget that there will continue to be a huge market in the US, in a year from now when the recovery starts."

Fischer added that the exporters have well understood what they have to do and that data showed that they were "reorienting" to the new dollar rate. . . . .

lefty wrote:

Specifically, what does the bolded part mean? Psychological barrier?

It would appear to be the level at which Israeli exporters would stop making a profit.

_________________“I'm not a member of any organized party. I'm a Democrat.”-Will Rogers